Astronomers just documented a once-in-a-lifetime birth. They captured a close-up photo of light and energy jetting away from a newborn star through space.

The Atacama Large Millimenter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile took the image. It shows a giant glowing mass that is an energetic young star known as Herbig-Haro 46/47.

The glowing mass that is the new star formed as gas and dust collided....and its birth can be witnessed in the stunning image.

A press release from the European Southern Observatory says that young stars eject matter at up to a million kilometers per hour.

"This system is similar to most isolated low mass stars during their formation and birth," Diego Mardones of the Universidad de Chile wrote in a press release. "But it is also unusual because the outflow impacts the cloud directly on one side of the young star and escapes out of the cloud on the other. This makes it an excellent system for studying the impact of the stellar winds on the parent cloud from which the young star is formed."

The star is far away, about 1400 light years in the constellation Vela. The photo shows two jets moving in opposite directions-one towards Earth. In previous experiments, the second jet was hidden due to clouds of dust. The new photos will allow astronomers to measure the jets more accurately.

The Atacama Desert is one of the driest, most remote places in the world-but the telescope there is world-class. ALMA was actually still under construction when the image is captured. The internationally-funded effort to the tune of over a billion dollars will capture many more images in years to come.